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Plants Are Like People…They Can Get Sunburnt Too!

When planning a garden, timing is crucial. It is important to plant in early spring or fall so that the plants can establish themselves before dealing with any extremes in heat or cold. The past couple of months, I haven’t done too much blogging since I have been so busy trying to make sure all of our new plants are comfortable in their new environment. With the exception of just a few plants, I selected only things that are very drought tolerant since we are in Los Angeles (we are currently in the middle of a really bad drought here in Southern California).

This week has had extreme temperatures here in L.A., definitely way out of the normal range for spring. Hot even compared to our normal summer temperatures. Like 105 degrees in the shade, just a few miles from the ocean kind of heat. Some of my plants were definitely not ready for this kind of heat. Yesterday was the worst heat all week, and when I went outside in the evening, a lot of my new plants were wilting and looking quite miserable. The nasturtiums in specific surprised me the most…some of them literally got burnt to a crisp! I was surprised since nasturtiums grow wild here along most of the horse trails nearby. However, we don’t normally get that kind of extreme desert heat here!

Some of my sun-loving succulents also got a bit crispy as well. 😦

This one surprised me the most…I moved most of my houseplants out of the living room so I could keep the dark drapes closed and keep as much heat out of the house as possible. I relocated all of my houseplants to our two patios so they would still be able to get some sun. These jade plants were placed in the south facing, covered patio and got pretty burnt. I guess the change was too much for them since they had been indoors previously. My outdoor jade plants are all doing okay.

Last night, after seeing how droopy everything had gotten, I gave everything a good deep watering, and I mixed up a super-revive solution for all of our new plants. I made a diluted mixture of compost tea, seaweed emulsion, fish emulsion, and expired breastmilk that had to be cleaned out from the freezer anyway. I know it sounds crazy, but expired breastmilk does wonders for wilting and depressed plants! It is packed full of nutrients, and whenever I have some to spare, I feed it to whichever plants are most in need of a pick-me-up! This morning, everything looked much better (minus the crispy bits). 🙂

And just for fun, here’s our little cutie, trying to stay cool inside the house. 🙂